>Perhaps if Universities would not so
>narrowly concentrate on one or two languages, the lack of
>Ada practitioners argument would be seen as a sham.

I'd just like to expand on that a bit to say that perhaps if management didn't
concentrate on knowledge of one or two languages when looking for staff, then
the lack of Ada practitioners argument would be seen as a sham.

I have used Ada, C and Pascal in depth, as well as assemblers for a few
processors, a reasonable amount of Occam, a bit of [Visual] Basic, a little C++,
a little Forth, some Lisp and most recently have had to pick up an understanding
of CORAL. In my experience, most languages have the same fundamental concepts,
often only differentiated by the syntax. Obviously once you get past the
fundamentals you start getting into more specific parts such as tasking (e.g.
the Ada task, Occam PAR construct). Personally I don't understand why anyone
would specifically demand good Ada knowledge for a long term assignment, as long
as the applicant was well versed in at least two or three other high level
languages.

(Actually - having tried to maintain Ada code written in the early days by C
programmers, maybe I should retract that :-)

John